Karnataka Govt Scouts For Collaboration With Switzerland For AI, ML, Blockchain

Bengaluru, 9 April 2019: The Karnataka government is scouting for collaboration with Switzerland in the area of artificial intelligence, machine learning, blockchain, big data and other related technologies which are much sought after in the pharmaceutical and healthcare sector. 

The state which is the information technology capital of the world is seen to be ideally positioned to maximise the expertise from Switzerland which is the hub for innovations in healthcare, according to the government. 

An Indo-Swiss healthcare initiative highlighted the impact of technologies and creating a path towards digital healthcare. During the Digital Health Week in 2019, India and Switzerland are taking a closer collaboration and are positioned adequately to take many of its efforts through a week long market exploration programme curated by Swissnex, a Switzerland-government-promoted organisation. 

In Bengaluru, the digital health conclave was a platform to build networks in the areas of AI, machine learning, augmented reality, robotics, big data analytics to enable collaborators to have exchange programmes like university-industry, university to university, industry and government. 

According to Ahmed Abdulla, founder and CEO, Digipharm, the company has developed the first tech platform for value-based pricing. This model encourages risk sharing between patient, hospital and insurance providers. Since over 70 per cent of the payments are out of pocket, a blockchain solution would encourage paying for performance than volume. 

In a dedicated session on AI, ML for global health, Dr. Prajwal, founder & CSO, Clemedi highlighted the path to better medical diagnosis using machine learning. “Technology applications could enable faster diagnosis. Detection of TB through machine learning will help decipher the genetic code that guides doctors for personalised therapy. It will also give medical practitioners a direction on whether the drug will work or not.” 

In this regard the patented solution from Clemedi has built in algorithms based on cloud based platform. Just as India gears up to eradicate TB and offset the challenge of drug resistant TB, such tests would enable speedy and accurate detection for quicker access of therapy, he said. 

Considerable promising medical and point of care devices under validation across the country are yet to enter the market. Now validation requires data which needs to be presented to the regulatory authorities for approval of market entry, said Deepanwita Chattopadhyay - chairman & CEO, IKP Knowledge Park who chaired the session on AI, ML for Global Health. 

Dr. Shravan Subramanyam, managing director, Roche Diagnostics India and Prof. Paul C Salins, sr. vice president, NH Narayana Health and medical director, Mazumdar Shaw Medical Center said that digital health is critical to leapfrog in patient care. 

While there are challenges like marketability of digital health technology for start-ups, there is a need to access multi- entrepreneurial capability which create a cluster of capabilities. Only such an ecosystem could help healthcare outcomes be optimised and also provide an opportunity for further development of the technology, said Prof. Salins. 

Dr Subramanyam noted that there was a need to widen our reach to deliver digital healthcare. Personalised health required data for targeted care and therefore there was a need to invest in data coming in from specific start-ups which had the expertise in it. Pharmabiz